Huh, after reading your post and some comments I am just glad iMessage never picked up in my country lol.
I moved from my iPhone to an Android phone without a hassle because most of my third party apps were multiplatform and here nobody uses SMS (it is even weird to mention it in 2023 lol) sadly the alternative ain’t better, here everybody uses WhatsApp, at least I talk with my closest friends with Telegram.
I don’t understand the bitching about it, we users were asking for this, it is the good thing about Lemmy/Fediverse, you have tons of options, and probably will have more, heck even the PWA are awesome, no need to download anything at all.